China Issues Sharp Rebuke to U.S. Calls for an Investigation on Google Attacks

BEIJING — China delivered a bristling response on Monday to the United States’ demand that it investigate recent attacks on American computers from Chinese soil, saying that any suggestion that it conducted or condoned the hackers’ intrusions was “groundless and aims to denigrate China.”

The comment, in a published interview with a government spokesman, was part of a broadside in China’s state-run news media on Monday that cast the United States as a cyberhegemonist, trying to dominate the global information flow by meddling in Chinese Internet policies.

Interviews and news articles placed in major state newspapers and on prominent Web sites underscored the chill in public exchanges between the governments since Jan. 12, when Googlethreatened to leave China unless Beijing stopped censoring its search results.

Google issued the ultimatum after discovering efforts by still-unidentified Chinese hackers to steal valuable corporate software code and break into the Google mailboxes of Chinese human-rights activists. Dozens of other American computers were also targets of the attack, Google has said.

China’s reaction to the issue, at first muted, has been caustic since Friday, a day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for Beijing to conduct a “transparent” inquiry into the attack. Mrs. Clinton also singled out China’s Internet censorship as a threat to the free flow of information.

The Chinese government’s comments come atop months of increasingly stringent limits on what average Chinese citizens can view on the Internet, and increasingly strict programs to monitor those who try to view unapproved content.

From blocking or closing down thousands of blogs and social-networking sites to accusing the United States of seeking information hegemony, the government has made it clear that the control of information has become even more of a central priority than in years past, according to David Bandurski, an analyst and author at the Hong Kong-based China Media Project, who spoke in a telephone interview on Monday.

“The C.C.P. media worldview is that you have China versus a hostile West in this global war for public opinion,” he said, referring to the China Communist Party. China’s paradox, he said, is that while Beijing accuses the United States of “information imperialism,” its own policies seek to shut out dissenting voices — including those of many of its own citizens — and to make the Beijing government’s view of the world China’s dominant voice.

Monday’s fusillade by the Chinese not only dismissed Mrs. Clinton’s statements, but also depicted the United States as cyberspace’s villain and China as its unwilling victim.

Zhou Yonglin, the deputy operations chief of China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team, was quoted as saying that China was the world’s largest target for hackers, with more than 262,000 Internet addresses under assault last year, and that the greatest share of attacks — one in six — originated in the United States.

Mr. Zhou also questioned Google’s claim that attacks on its computers had been traced to Chinese soil, saying that other American companies had sought his agency’s help after previous attacks, but that it “has not been alerted to any specific report on the issue submitted by Google.”

“We have been hoping that Google will contact us so that we could have details on this issue and provide them help if necessary,” he said in the interview, which was conducted by the Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

Separately, an unidentified spokesman for the State Council Information Office defended as “totally correct” China’s censorship of Internet sites that the government deems harmful. “We are resolutely against those who make a issue of things without referring to actual facts by needlessly accusing China, ignoring Chinese laws and interfering in Chinese internal politics,” the spokesman told Xinhua.

The State Council, the rough equivalent of the American government’s cabinet, is among the most powerful Chinese governing bodies.

The sharpest language, however, came from the Communist Party-backed Global Times, which frequently criticizes American policy. The newspaper quoted a Chinese analyst as calling Google’s complaint “a U.S. government-initiated strategy with covert political intentions.”

“As the global landscape is undergoing profound irreversible shifts, the calculated free-Internet scheme is just one step of a U.S. tactic to preserve its hegemonic domination,” Yan Xuetong, who heads the Institute of International Studies at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, said in the article.

A separate article noted that the United States Congress expanded the power of security agencies to monitor Americans’ e-mail and Internet activities in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it accused Mrs. Clinton of preaching a double standard by criticizing China’s limitations on Internet freedoms.

A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2010, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: China Issues Sharp Rebuke to U.S. Calls for an Investigation on Google Attacks. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe